Why I don’t go down on girls

Most people have holstered secrets which they whip out and fire off when they’re drunk enough to be candid with you.

I think I’ve heard most of them. Over stained pub tables, in misty smoking areas, stupidly wrecked people have told me their stories.

The pain of their parents’ divorce. The younger sibling they only just found out about. The hidden struggle with depression. That they’re pretty sure they’re bisexual, or maybe “even gay”.

And in this atmosphere of mutual truthfulness I’m usually hammered enough to tell my story, reveal my secret: I don’t go down on girls.

When I say it and study the reaction of the people I say it to, I always feel as if I’ve knocked over an expensive crystal urn at a classy dinner party, or wandered into an airport terminal and screamed the word “BOMB”. They’re shocked.

But they also think it’s weird.

§

It was near the start of this decade and I was pale and thin and desperate to be more interesting than I actually was.

Sexually, I was at a peculiar crossroads. A thrillingly sex ed free Catholic education combined with growing up as a teenage boy in the golden era of streaming hardcore HD pornography prepared me for sex about as well as a man with a bazooka is equipped to swat flies.

Then I found someone and the usual stuff came to pass and it was good, with one important exception: I never went down on her. I’m not sure why I didn’t but there you go. After that there were a few what ifs, some maybes, a couple of (quite literal) close shaves, but still the fact remained, I’d never gone down on a girl.

At this point I began to grow worried. What if I never went down on a girl? What would happen to me if I didn’t become an outstanding giver of head? I imagined myself sinking straight down to the bottom of the fuck chain, scathingly ignored by women everywhere, my virility so diminished as to be non-existent.

It transfered from mere worry to fixation as time passed, with every flunked opportunity. I began to think about cunnilingus a lot – to paraphrase Pusha T – 24/7, 365, pussy stayed on my mind. I did my research, I studied Men’s Health and Thought Catalog and Elite Daily and Cosmopolitan (“not too much chin, please”).

I was about as ready to lick a girl out as anybody ever has been when it finally went down. I remember it well, the flattering and intimate light of dusk, the hair stroking, neck kissing, shirt unbuttoning conventionality of it all. Shakily, I put my hands on her thighs, a while later she arched and shivered.

And then it happened.

§

I find the reactions people have to me saying I don’t go down on girls more telling than the fact itself.

If I say it in mixed company something remarkable happens to the boys. They become happily agitated: “You don’t do what Will?!”

You become the cack-handed fumbler who probably doesn’t know what a clitoris is. And they immediately present themselves – with mechanical eagerness – as the real mouth wizards, as proper tongue gurus.

It says a lot about the way men treat sex – coarse, uncomplicated, accessible – that the first reaction to this story is to use it as a way to compete and jostle past me up the shagging order rather than asking why I don’t do it.

The shoulders roll back, the chins lift several inches and the tongues practically hang out of the mouths. Without exception every guy who hears me say this immediately starts explaining why they’re one of history’s most accomplished licker outers.

This only happens if girls are also present. Between guys, well, find me an average bloke who enjoys going down on women as much as he claims to in front of them and I’ll find you that missing Malaysian airliner.

What’s more understandable and fair is the way girls react to it: not angry, just disappointed. Or as a friend said to me: “I just don’t get it Will, I mean, you look relatively normal.”

§

So back to that night. My brain was slick and oiled and ready after digesting thousands of articles like “How Not to Go Down on a Girl” and “Head Games: A Lesbian’s Advice for Going Down.” I was busily turning information into action. In the end it’s clear that I over prepared, that I aced the exam a little too well.

There’s no way of being ambiguous here: the first time I went down on a girl she ejaculated all over my face.

The next day my eyes were dry and itchy. They appeared to be swimming in some kind of red soup. More than piss I felt rinsed in a shame and embarrassment so total as to make me say to myself that I’d never go down on a girl a second time.

It isn’t rational or nice but it’s the ridiculous truth. And it really, really put me off going there ever again.

§

What exactly can you do with your taste in sex? How easy is it to change once it’s set? Once you’ve figured out what you like and what you don’t like do you really want to alter it that much?

Consistency is a playground for the dull. But when something gross and traumatic happens to you, something that just freaks you out, you don’t exactly yearn to go back and revisit it.